Hurricane Hijinks!

Recently, we had a visitor to our fair state of New Jersey. Her name was Irene and after she left, it looked like a hurricane had hit.

We were a lot luckier than some people, but it still was a bit much to deal with, on top of the usual with the twins, who are like a force of nature unto themselves.

For starters, my husband’s car got flooded. Dirty water up over the tires, even! And since his car was out of commission, he had to take my mamavan, which meant that the kiddos and I were housebound. I couldn’t even take them out to play, as things were pretty ripped up outside, with fallen and falling tree limbs, downed power lines in our front yard, and everything super-saturated with water.

Then we found out that there was a boil water order in effect. I would have loved to have boiled our water, however, as it was currently brown and goopy and spurting up from our DRAIN (and our dishwasher) and flooding our kitchen floor, that didn’t seem like a viable option.

Luckily, right before the hurricane hit, I had gone shopping for the twins’ back-to-school supplies and had picked up enough drinking water to get us through.

And while the authorities said that the water was fine to shower with, DO NOT get it in your mouth AT ALL COSTS!!

Hmm….and me with two 4 yr old girls.

So washing up was out of the question, and there is a limit to how much personal hygiene can be effected with hand sanitizer.

So after we started getting a little grubby and ripe, I carted the girls off to their grandmother’s place, where she did have hot water, but no electric power. We all showered, and just as we were about to go home again, Bubbe’s power came back on.

And, just as we got home, the boil water notice was lifted.

But.

There’s always a ‘but’, isn’t there?

But, there was no hot water, and we were under strict orders that things like doing laundry or running dishwashers was out.

Unfortunately, during this crisis, Zanna had taken to piddling her pants every couple of hours. It didn’t matter how often I plonked her down on the potty. She would refuse to pee. And then 10 seconds after she was off the potty, she piddled her pants again!

We had run thru all the clean underwear, and I had to resort to putting the girls back in diapers. This suited Zanna just fine, but now I’m worried that all our hard work getting the girls potty trained will be for naught.